{"author_name": "johnfn", "cat": "LD #21", "comments": [], "epoch": 1314674640, "likes": 3, "metadata": {"p_key": "63582", "p_author": "johnfn", "p_authorkey": "3187", "p_urlkey": "99367", "p_title": "Escape Artist Postmortem Pt. 3: Right and Wrong", "p_cat": "LD #21", "p_event": "LD21", "p_time": "1314674640", "p_likes": "3", "p_comments": "0", "p_status": "UPD5", "us_key": "3187", "us_name": "johnfn", "us_username": "johnfn", "event_start": "1313712000", "event_key": "7", "event_name": "LD21"}, "text": "<p>It seems to be traditional to, in your postmortem, say what went right and wrong. So here goes.</p>\n <p>Good stuff</p>\n <ul>\n <li>I managed to adhere to my schedule almost perfectly. I&#8217;ve had enough practice with timed contests by this point to know exactly how much I can accomplish in a certain amount of time, which is a huge boon.</li>\n <li>With two hours left, I decided to include a boss, because I felt the game &#8216;didn&#8217;t feel right&#8217; otherwise. As much as a recipe for disaster as that sounds, I pulled it off, and debugged the last boss bug with only minutes to spare. Like a boss. 😀</li>\n <li>Python was an incredible language for gamedev, even though I had only recently learned pygame. I was much more productive than in (say) Actionscript.</li>\n <li>I feel my graphics have much improved since my LD19 entry.</li>\n </ul>\n <div>Bad stuff</div>\n <div>\n <ul>\n <li>I had a wrist failure which took me out of the compo for almost 10 hours. I wrote about it in detail in pt 2 of my postmortems.</li>\n <li>I was making some dumb decisions by the end of the first day. I prioritized sound effects over getting the game done, and I&#8217;m not quite sure why I did so in retrospect. I think it was because I was really tired and it was detracting from my ability to make good decisions.</li>\n <li>As much as I&#8217;ve improved, I still feel my graphics were subpar, and I should have devoted more time to them.</li>\n <li>I wanted to apply fancy graphical filters and stuff like that, but didn&#8217;t have time. More than that, I didn&#8217;t know how. The graphical style of appy 1000mg in particular was a great inspiration to me, but I was unable to replicate it in any way. I need to look more into pygame&#8217;s advanced features in the future.</li>\n <li>I had to port Python, which took about 6 hours of work. But since I had work, I didn&#8217;t get the ports out until 24 hours later, which meant I fell behind in ratings. That was disappointing at the time, although I&#8217;ve mostly caught up now, I feel.</li>\n </ul>\n </div>\n <div>What I&#8217;ve learned:</div>\n <div>\n <ul>\n <li>Get an ergonomic keyboard!</li>\n <li>Care more about graphics. They really are important. Particularly, after you&#8217;ve finished with implementation, graphics are arguably the most important thing to work on.</li>\n <li>Porting is hard. It&#8217;s such an advantage to choose a language you don&#8217;t have to port.</li>\n </ul>\n <div>Two big problems with the entry, and one thing that&#8217;s separate. I&#8217;m going to work on graphics and buying a nice keyboard (that second one is pretty easy to work on :D) and I plan to really knock LD22 out of the park! <img src=\"http://ludumdare.com/compo/wp-includes/images/smilies/simple-smile.png\" alt=\":)\" class=\"wp-smiley\" style=\"height: 1em; max-height: 1em;\" /></div>\n </div>\n <div>Check out my game, <a href=\"http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-21/?action=preview&amp;uid=3187\">Escape Artist</a>!</div>", "time": "August 29th, 2011 10:24 pm", "title": "Escape Artist Postmortem Pt. 3: Right and Wrong"}